Elegy for a Lost Star (47 page)

Within seconds, thudding bootsteps could be heard approaching rapidly in the inner corridor; the Eyes that survived from the parapets were rushing through the underground tunnels of the Cauldron with their report. While he awaited their intelligence, Grunthor turned to his aide de camp.

“Blast muster,” he ordered. “Get me every bloody commander within earshot o' this place; all Oi got now is tribal leaders.” The aide fled into the passageway. Grunthor turned to the Archons and pointed to the interior and exterior schematics of Ylorc that hung, rendered in minute detail, on the wall of every interior meeting room.

The Eye spies, their normally dark and hirsute faces stained with ash, came into the room, three in all.

“Report,” Grunthor demanded. His skin, normally the color of old bruises, had flushed to an angry leather color, his amber eyes blazing almost gold.

“Dragon; out of ground above Kraldurge,” said the first of the Eyes in the tongue of his tribe. Grunthor smacked the table angrily, and the shaken man quickly switched into the common dialect. “Copper hide. Keeping to the ground, not taking to the air like one at council. Same color.”

The second Eye nodded. “Torn wing,” he said quickly. “May not be able to fly. Perched on Trexlev crag now, not attacking; seems to be watching or listening.”

“Blasted Heath is burning,” reported the last of the Eyes, a woman. “Brushfires on wintergrass; frozen ground will stop the spread at frost line.”

Grunthor nodded. “Back to yer posts,” he said, then turned to the Archons. “Assessments?”

“Traditional weapons will be useless,” said Yen the broadsmith. “Can't even use the heat of the forges against a dragon; fire will not harm it. Need special arrows, special blades to pierce dragon hide. We have none.”

“Correction,” Grunthor snarled. “We have
one
, but o' course it's not
'ere
, as usual. Next?”

“Breastworks, redoubts, defense, irrigation, and sanitation tunnels will all be vulnerable,” Dreekak, the Master of Tunnels, said solemnly. “Beast can use them as we do; can travel wherever they reach. Our own defenses will work against us in this.”

“Good point,” noted Grunthor with a grudging admiration. “ 'Oo else?”

“Many catapults working,” suggested Vrith. “In peacetime have used them to fling hay and seedbags across the Blasted Heath to deeper settlements. Perhaps rocks, if not weapons, can injure it?”

The mining Archon, Greel, the Face of the Mountain, spoke up quickly.

“Much scrap rock outside of Gurgus from tower rebuilding,” he noted. “Much sharp, full of glass shards. Might even make dragon sick.”

Grunthor's bulbous lips pressed together appreciatively. “Hmmm,” he said.

“One more thought,” added Trug. “If we knew anything about this dragon, we might have a better idea how to attack it.”

Omet, the only non-Bolg Archon, stood up suddenly. He said nothing; his elevation to his feet was more a sign of a sudden realization than an intention to speak. The Sergeant recognized this, and held up his hand to stem any other commentary.

“You were all here three years ago, when the council was assaulted by the dragon Anwyn?” he asked, trying to recall history in which he had not taken part.

“Yeah,” said Grunthor irritably.

Omet spoke even more slowly and deliberately. “And was not the wing of that dragon injured as well? Didn't Rhapsody drag her blade through it when the beast had her in the air?”

All sound left the room; the Archons ceased to breathe at the expression on the Sergeant's face.

“Yeah,” Grunthor said again, a deadly dryness in his voice. “But that bitch is
dead;
Oi saw 'er fall out o' the sky, and closed the grave on 'er myself. She's
dead
.”

Dreekak coughed nervously. “Late summer, a patrol near the breastworks reported some rumblings in the Moot,” he said quietly. “Thought them to be aftershocks of Gurgus explosion.” His last words came out barely above a whisper. “Sent you the report, sir.”

Grunthor's face flushed an even deeper shade of purple. He threw back his head and roared again; the blast echoed through the corridors of the Cauldron all the way out to the openings above the canyon, and reverberated below.

The Archons waited for the string of hideous profanities that followed, some in Bolgish, others in Bengard, Grunthor's mother tongue, to subside before exhaling.

“Hrekin,”
the Sergeant muttered finally. “Dragons; ya can't never get rid of the bastards. Guess ya got to kill 'em more than once. Wonderful.”

The door opened, and eight of his military commanders crowded into the rooms. The Sergeant went over to confer with them about troop position and casualties, while the Archons began quietly conferring among themselves.

Finally, when he turned back to them, they were standing, the light of inspiration shining from their faces.

Grunthor eyed them suspiciously.

“All right,” he demanded, “what are ya thinkin'?”

T
he dragon was too lost in the search for a name, too intent on finding the woman from the grotto, to pay much attention to the movement of the Bolg. She was aware of it, of course, in infinite detail; the minutiae of the inner realm of the Cauldron, everything else within five miles, was apparent to her. But her mind, fractured and limited as it was, obsessed as it was, considered the movements nothing more than the pathetic scramblings of the equivalent of insects. She had destroyed hundreds of them with little more than a breath; she would destroy more before she was done, but whatever meaningless attempts they were making to defend against her wrath were not worth the diversion of her attention from the search for the woman.

She could sense a rush to retrieve the dead, the movements of the old and the young to deeper bunkers, lower ground, an effort that amused her. Moreover, she did not sense the presence of many weapons. The bows and
crossbows had proven useless against her, a fact that had sent her already-insane sense of invulnerability even higher.

Had she been more cognizant, more aware of her surroundings, she might have noticed the ruins of an ancient instrumentality that she had loathed in another life almost as much as she loathed the golden-haired woman in this one. When she was in human form, the ruler of a great nation and the champion of a mighty army, her first order in war had been to destroy that artifact; it had taken her soldiers almost five hundred years to accomplish that directive.

But that memory, along with most of the others she had made in her long lifetime, was buried deep in the recesses of the Past, where she could not find it.

Where is she?
the dragon demanded of the evanescent winds.
Where is the woman I seek? And her name! I want her name!

The wind howled around the mountain crag, saying nothing; very few words were spoken close enough to the summit to linger there, and those that were had blown away, off into the wide world.

Her fury returning, the beast rained fire down again from the mountain summit; no Bolg were above ground by now, so she had to content herself with the destruction of a few outposts and watchtowers, taking little satisfaction in watching them burn.

Perhaps I'm not able to hear because I am hungry
, she thought, remembering with pleasure the feast in the Hintervold, not just the satisfying fullness of meat, but the joy of destruction, the orgiastic sensation of utter fear and helplessness in the faces of the hunters.
Those few on the Heath were but appetizers. Well, we can rectify that
.

Her dragon sense told her that the majority of the population on the western side of the canyon was cowering in bunkers deep within the mountain, but that a substantial cadre had remained behind, large enough to provide a decent meal.

She slithered down the crag, toward the tunnels leading into the Cauldron.

The first shaft she came to was narrow; she did not know it, but it was merely a ventilation duct, used to circulate the heat from the forges into the tunnels to warm them in winter, and the cool wind of the mountain to bring fresh air in all other seasons. She considered squeezing through, but noticed another, wider tunnel nearby, one that led to a central duct system, through which she could chase down anything that she wanted.

Quite a bit of the remaining prey was at the end of it.

She crawled across the lip of its ledge and into the tunnel, her eyes gleaming with blue fire.

G
runthor could sense the change in the earth as soon as the dragon entered the tunnel, stripping the lore from the land as she did.

“Ya bloody 'arpy,” he muttered under his breath. “Thought Oi'd buried ya three years ago. Well, keep comin', darlin'. Oi'll kill ya as often as need be.”

He waited until she had come to the first bend before turning to Kubila, who was waiting beside him, ready to deliver his orders.

“Now would be good,” the Sergeant said casually.

The messenger nodded, and sped off like an arrow on the string.

Down the empty corridors and tunnels he ran, his route planned out to the footstep. His destination was almost a quarter mile away, but Kubila could cover that distance in a little over a minute.

He could see the light in the open doorway; the others were awaiting his signal.

“Now!” he shouted, still a few paces outside the central tunnel.

The Archons waiting past the door heard and nodded to each other.

Trug, the Voice, echoed the Sergeant's order into the central speaking tube, the instrument through which his words would be heard throughout the mountains.

“Now!”

Dreekak, Master of Tunnels and responsible for the network of vents through which the beast was traveling, seized the great valve and turned the wheel with all his might until it opened the floodgates.

All over the Cauldron, his tunnel workers were doing the same.

The dragon felt a shift in the air of the tunnel as the vacuum was released, but too intent on her prey to be distracted, she continued crawling forward until her sensitive nostrils were suddenly, viciously assaulted with the stench of raw sewage.

Which had been released in one enormous flood from the central cistern and all the collection pipes simultaneously.

And was heading, with all the force the ventilation system's pumps could muster, directly for her.

Shock flooded the dragon's awareness; she was overwhelmed with nausea, made even more acute by the sensitivity of her dragon sense. What to an ordinary being would have been revolting, vomitorious, was utterly incapacitating to the wyrm. All of her senses, her motor abilities, and her equilibrium were immediately unbalanced by the onslaught of offal and excrement that was rolling in a great, odious wave toward her.

She tried to right herself, to turn in the tunnel and escape, to burrow into the earth, even, but the tunnels built originally by her long-dead, much hated husband had been fashioned from and reinforced with steel, and so did not yield to her. She could only roil helplessly, twisted in a tangle of draconic arms and legs to which she was still not totally accustomed, when the sea of filth blasted around the turn and swelled over her, choking her, threatening to drown her.

In
hrekin
.

Gasping in horror, swallowing and vomiting simultaneously, the beast was subsumed in the mudslide of Bolgish waste, made even more foul by the vagaries of their diet. She struggled to breathe but her nostrils were filled with feces; she kicked her taloned feet, trying in vain to gain purchase on the tunnel wall, finally being flipped ignominiously onto her head as a great plug of sewage formed around her, obstructing the tunnel completely.

For a moment.

Then the pressure from the ventilation system backed up sufficiently to blast the clog of dragon and a kingdom's worth of waste out of the tunnel and into the canyon below.

Whereupon the mountain guards, under the direction of Yen the broadsmith, Greel the master of the mines, and Vrith, the lame accountant, unleashed a hail of glass-shard-imbued boulders down on her.

Sickened and bruised, the beast lay at the bottom of the canyon for a moment, trying to return to consciousness. In the distance, her dragon sense noted weakly that the catapults on the ledges above her were training upon her again.

Heedless of direction, with the last of her strength, the beast burrowed hastily into the ground of the canyon floor, following the long-dead riverbed out of the kingdom of the Bolg to the north, where she collapsed in pain and exhaustion.

She was too far away, or perhaps just too spent, to hear the shouts of victory and the songs of jubilation, chanted in harsh bass voices, ringing off the canyon walls and up into the winter night.

G
runthor lifted a glass and toasted the Archons.

“Well, Oi've always told you lads to use what ya got, and use what ya know. Oi guess this proves ya all know
hrekin
.”

A
she ran his hands over his wife's forehead. The skin beneath his palm was cooler, but papery thin, dry. Her lips were pale, almost the same color as her skin, having lost a good deal of their redness with the loss of so much of her blood.

“Dry,” she whispered. “My throat is so dry.”

Ashe looked at Krinsel. “Is the baby any closer to coming?” he asked the midwife quietly. The Bolg woman shook her head.

The Lord Cymrian glanced from Rhapsody's face to those of the others standing in the dark cave. Each aspect, each being was utterly different, and
yet they all bore the same look of bewilderment, of quiet despair, as if there was nothing to be done in the world save for watching this woman labor and die.

Quickly he took off his cloak of mist and covered his wife with it, hoping the cool vapor would ease the dryness she was feeling. With a shaking hand he drew his weapon, Kirsdarke, the elemental sword of water; the blade came forth from its scabbard, waves of billowing mist running along it like the froth of the sea. He held it in his left hand, allowing his right to rest on her belly, and concentrated, willing the water to seep into her, to sustain her, to bring hydration and healing where the water within her blood was lost.